By Mike Landry
Eryn O'Neill's tugboat bathed in Halifax's ubiquitous fog.
When I lived in Halifax, I took the bus past the 91-year-old Imperial Oil refinery almost every day. It often smelled like rotten eggs, but at night the flame from excess burning gases rose high and, since it’s nestled on the banks of the Halifax Harbour, in the mornings fog would envelope its intricate piping. It has to be the most beautiful oil refinery in North America.
I thought I was the only one who felt this way, until I saw Eryn O’Neill’s paintings. Like me, the Ottawa-born artist was drawn to the refinery for her 2008 series Unfamiliar Perceptions. And she’s returning to the refinery for her latest work, Northeast-Southwest, which focuses on the Halifax waterfront as a meeting place for industry and the urban city.
“It’s the combination of industry and leisure from the Bedford basin to the oil refinery. It covers what I thought was the most interesting features of the waterfront,” says O’Neill.
Adding a special touch to the new work is the fact that the oil paintings weren’t done in Halifax. O’Neill moved back to Ottawa about eight months ago, and worked on the pieces from source material. The pieces ended up being more monochromatic and creating a nostalgic feel.
Building from the very architectural and linear drawing technique O’Neill used in Unfamiliar Perceptions, the new work is more complicated compared to her earlier works of urbanscapes. However, the work also marks a return to the bright colours featured in early paintings of the city from Citadel Hill.
Northeast-Southwest is also O’Neill’s first series completed out of school. She wasn’t sure if she had a whole series based on her random source material, but after a few key images (like the Tugboat featured above) her she settled on the waterfront focus.
“Being sent out completely on your own, self-motivated with no guidance is kind of overwhelming at first…I was thinking just keep going something will come up. It was a mixed blessing. It was kind of freeing sometimes, and at other moments I was like, ‘what am I going to do with these?’ But it worked out.”
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